A FABULOUS WORLD: VILÉM FLUSSER

“Um mundo fabuloso” (“A Fabulous World”) is one of Flusser’s earliest articles, published on November 28, 1964, in the literary supplement of the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo. In it, with exact fantasy, an octopus, a tapeworm, and a human fetus address the reader on their superiority over the others, exploring the friction between Darwinian and Freudian theories. If Flusser resorts to the tradition of the fable, it is only to point to the fact that we cannot go back to the times of La Fontaine or those even more primitive times of cavemen and their hunt stories around the bonfires, for the fables of our times are scientific. The essay can be considered seminal because in it Flusser already plays with the characteristic perspectivism of his philosophical fiction, and because later the philosopher will dedicate individual texts to each of the three animals. The octopus will be the main subject of Vampyroteuthis infernalis (FLUSSER; BEC, 2011), in which Flusser claimed to have done “fictional science”, and the others turn into protagonists of two of the “scenarios for the future” from Angenommen, or What If? (FLUSSER, 2022).